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Bearing Bad News

In Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” soon after the re-creation of D-Day, attention turns stateside to a middle-aged woman washing dishes as a car approaches her home. The vehicle comes to a stop, and the woman — knowing what awaits — steps outside and onto her porch before falling to the ground, almost as if she were a soldier wounded in battle. Spielberg chooses to place the camera behind his actress and at somewhat of a distance; we do not see her face when she hears the news that three of her sons have been killed in combat. There is no audible dialogue, either. The power of the scene lies in its universality: a parent collapsing from an emotional anguish projected over a barren landscape.

Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute” — inspired by a Pulitzer Prize-winning article he wrote for The Rocky Mountain News — tells the story of Maj. Steve Beck of the United States Marine Corps, whose job it is to deliver the news to the families of marines who have died. In this book, Sheeler reports on the wrenching and commonplace details of “casualty notification” — the moments that Spielberg’s film leaves to the imagination. Here are Beck and a Navy chaplain, on a typical day, informing a young woman that her husband has been killed in Iraq (two people are required for every such visit, Sheeler tells us, for physical protection as well as emotional support): “Finally she stood, but she still couldn’t speak. As the major and the chaplain remained on their feet, she glared at them. It was a stare the major had seen before, the one that hurts the most.”

Sheeler’s book follows several families, from the time they receive notification to the burials of their loved ones to their attempts to find solace and move forward. In Major Beck, the author has found an ideal protagonist, someone who is simultaneously guarded and insightful. Like the families he must face, Beck finds comfort in the rituals and rules that guide the process. The corps has specific instructions for how to go about the job, but the major has his own routines, too: “Beck made a point of learning each dead marine’s name and nickname. He touched the toys they grew up with and read the letters they wrote home.” Still, Beck soon understands why “even the ‘grunts’ on the front lines” say they prefer mortal danger to his job. “I can’t help but feel that I’m the person who’s bringing them all that pain,” he says to Sheeler. “That because I’m standing in front of them, they’re feeling as bad as they’re ever going to feel.”

War may indeed be an extension of politics, but Sheeler is intent on letting his narrative unfold in the most apolitical manner possible. He does note the heavy strain of casualties on an often underprepared military — one grieving father is shown his son’s coffin for the first time while it sits on a forklift — but Sheeler grasps that everyone reading his book will have preconceived, if nuanced, notions about America’s current conflicts, and therefore he can tell his story straight. The problem with “Final Salute” is that it reads like a series of newspaper articles strung together somewhat incoherently. And the episodic nature of the narrative may leave readers confused as to which story Sheeler is focusing on at any given time. (He should also get a prize for one of the most oddly arrogant insertions in modern memory. In an author’s note, he writes: “An editor at the newspaper pointed out a crucial similarity she said she saw in both Beck and myself. ‘You have caring in common.’”)

The book’s crucial flaw, however, is unintentionally revealed in an early remark Sheeler makes about Beck’s work: “While each door is different,” he writes, “the scenes inside are almost always the same.” Precisely because these scenes are so depressingly similar, the book feels padded as well as slight. Still, there is something oddly comforting about the nearly interchangeable reactions the families display when confronted with a crushing loss. Perhaps unwittingly, then, Sheeler has written something that captures the universal as much as it does the personal.

FINAL SALUTE

A Story of Unfinished Lives.

By Jim Sheeler.

Illustrated. 280 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

Isaac Chotiner has written for The New Republic, The Washington Post and other publications.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Bearing Bad News. Today's Paper|Subscribe